


Tether

by StairwellWit



Series: Salve [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, vague description of sexual situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 02:54:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16845733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StairwellWit/pseuds/StairwellWit
Summary: Maybe he can't find himself unless you're in the way.





	Tether

Some nights you take him apart. Pieces at a time.  
A vulture picking at ribs.  
He holds his own feet when you fuck him.  
Reaches and curls, long fingers around slender arches and holds it all at the base of your back. And maybe you love this so much because the angle is just right. Just tight enough and slick enough and he sobs your name like a slow knife into heaven's gate.  
But honestly?  
Honestly it's because he avoids himself almost entirely. Like he forgets he exists outside of a CCTV feed. Beast with a million eyes but not one sees himself. Once you say “Do you touch yourself?” His skin tastes like every good mistake you've ever made and every bad one you're bound to. You ask because sometimes you talk in bed and he responds with something so filthy it makes you blush, other times he just bites crime scene evidence into your shoulder. What he says this time, “Not if I can help it.” falls into neither of these categories. But it makes you sick in your core, wish you'd never asked. Because nothing has ever made more sense; the way he avoids himself in baggy shirts and mirrored surfaces. Like even though he's all knobby joints and Adams apple he forgets he has a fucking body attached to his brain. You don't ask again, joking or otherwise. Later though you realize, sometimes, you're hilt deep and he goes searching for himself. His hands and feet all coiled together, knees dug into your ribs. Squeezing you so tight like he's trying to break through you to get back to himself and you think, later, when the blood has redistributed, when you can feel through the pain meds again.  
You think just maybe he only touches himself with any kind of reverence if you touch him first. Like he's asking you for permission to love himself. It's sick, and sad, but it's still something like relief to you; that sometimes he wants himself. Sometimes that want is a want tethered to wanting you. Maybe he can't find himself unless you're in the way. You tell yourself he gets what he has to have in the scheme of things. This way it keeps you a necessity, or at least a novelty, with a name and a purpose. Instead of a series of disposable numbers.  
One night he moves your hand to his throat, your hips cradled into his thighs, sunk deep enough you can feel your nerve endings firing in the tips of your toes, he asks, "Have you thought of this? Of killing me?" His neck is dusky pink, splotched and imperfect. Tendons and sinew shifting mountain ranges under your grip. You'd be lying if you say no so you press just a little deeper, a little harder, enough to feel his throat undulate around a whimper.  
You say "Yes."  
You could have lied, acted appalled. You don't though, the reason being you like to know you can still say true things. When your whole existence is built on a kaleidoscope of fractured half truths, whole fibs, and black boxed reports. You want to know when it counts you can tell him the truth. His eyes close, blissful, you drop a kiss to his eyebrow.  
"Is it quick?" He asks.  
"No."  
His Cupid's bow is perfectly pulled just taught enough to barely smile. Slow, so slow, not slow enough, you can hear his ribs rattle, an inselberg of bone pressed into the half healed bruise from Syracuse on your hip. You can't help yourself, thumb pressing into the soft give of skin under his chin until he tilts down to catch his lip against the pad. You watch his tongue lick gun callouses and wonder if he can taste the blood you cleaned off on the plane.  
"Do I struggle?"  
"Always,” you say, feeling like you're making some kind of promise.  
He sighs then, lemon grass and bergamot, up from the place under your palm. The roll of his eyes and arc of his mouth is absolute ruin, a disaster. He is a destroyer of men. You're old enough to be afraid of him, you're just weak enough to ignore it.  
"Perfect,” he says, finally, just as his back arches and his hips curl in, wrapping you up in the long lined angles of his body.  
“Yes,” You say, you truly couldn't agree more.


End file.
